2011 has been a big year for social media at SAS.

• Our award-winning blogging program got a major makeover
• We relaunched the Knowledge Exchange in WordPress to provide great thought leadership content to our customers
• We debuted new corporate social media presences on Facebook and Google+
• The popular support.sas.com discussion forums moved to a new home at communities.sas.com.

For our employees:

• We launched the Social Media Resource Portal as the one-stop destination for all employees interested in social media
• Our internal social network, The Hub, was born and now connects nearly 8,000 employees
• Social Studies, our social media training & and education program, rolled out to all employees
• We introduced new standards for creating and managing company social media presences
• The new global social media team shared best practices and strategies

And those are just the highlights!

Today marks another important milestone for social media at SAS. You might have noticed a “Follow Us” on the upper right-hand side of sas.com. Our corporate website now features the SAS Social Media Portal, which is a page that highlights all of  the great things we’re doing in social media.

We’ve integrated live feeds from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, forums and Knowledge Exchanges. The site also features “quicklinks” to our main corporate social properties. We hope the SAS Social Media Portal will allow us to create more 1:1 connections between SAS and you, our customers and users.

The SAS community is what really drives us to continually build and improve upon our communications and relationships with you all. Social media allows us to create those connections in a more meaningful and direct way, and we hope you’ll join us there.